Avaya UCaaS vs RingEX: Which is a better fit?

Bernard: I'm Bernard, Unified Communications Cloud Consultant. And I rate the Avaya OneCloud UCaaS Service a four out of five. For more reviews and details about the Avaya Cloud Services, click below. Prior to using the Avaya OneCloud UCaaS Service, there was an evaluation of several solutions to replace the legacy of via PBX system. That included solutions, including Microsoft and Zoom and possibly the RingCentral solution. The solution for OneCloud UCaaS was a logical solution based on the recommendations from the resellers and the overall popularity of what is becoming a more cloud oriented service from Avaya. Avaya was chosen because of the familiarity of the Avaya Solutions overall from the reseller involved. It was relatively easy to understand the differences from the traditional solutions to the more of a cloud-based, licensed subscription-based service. And that led to the decision over some of the other alternatives. Switching to the Avaya OneCloud Service was relatively easy as there was an agreement to incorporate some of the new J series phones, which made it very easy to port the numbers, get the employees familiar with the new devices and the new services. And from an administrative perspective, it was easy to move to a subscription-based model without really changing a lot of the overall operations. Overall, it was very, very easy in general. My advice for anyone considering a cloud solution would be to consider what they have currently and then evaluate what their overall future needs are. With respect to the Avaya Solution, it provides a fully featured portfolio of cloud-based services, and you should compare that to Microsoft, for one. If you are a Microsoft shop, having a Microsoft solution is very attractive and will allow you to support a wide variety of different types of devices from Polycom or Poly and many others. If you're using the Avaya Solution, you're going to be really influenced to use Avaya only devices, which are not going to be readily available on other services that you might switch to later, such as 8x8 or others. But generally speaking, if you're a Microsoft shop, Microsoft is a great solution. If you are more into video overall, and that's the basis of how your employees are going to communicate, Zoom and their unified communication solution provides a very cost-effective and popular service used around the world for employees to easily use and learn. But if you are a more of a traditional Avaya-type customer, the Avaya Cloud Service, or OneCloud, is very attractive and can provide you with a fully featured voice and collaboration service along with many of their contact center solutions as well.

Anjan: Hi, my name is Anjan. I'm a managing director. For RingCentral Office, I give it a rating of four out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. The other applications that we considered prior to going with RingCentral were Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangout. For Zoom, we found the file sharing capability was limited. As I recall, Microsoft Teams really did not meet our needs at all in terms of a collaborative approach, because we were going to have about 25 to 30 people logging in simultaneously. Being able to send and receive files seamlessly through the application while being engaged in a video call did not really match up, and the same thing was with Google. I think the reasons that we chose RingCentral was, number one, cost. It was very, very affordable, more affordable than some of the other enterprise licensing parameters. From an actual application standpoint, we liked the seamless ability to be able to send and receive files back and forth. These were a group of students that we were working with. They were dispersed globally, and I needed to be able to access their submissions and their projects in a seamless manner, and be able to collaborate on them and provide them with feedback, and we found that RingCentral was offering the best opportunity and the platform to do that. RingCentral was extremely easy to integrate. Being a SAS application, there was no major installation or requirement. As a matter of fact, our participants could actually just log in with their browsers, so that was actually really beneficial as well. It also allowed for people that were participating in the seminar, if they had a lower bandwidth or if they did not have adequate internet access in terms of bandwidth, that they could still participate in the RingCentral forum without losing any of the direction or visibility or collaborative efforts that the application itself provides. So those were all great, great things with RingCentral, and again, allowed us to very easily and seamlessly utilize the product. The recommendation that we would give for people using RingCentral is that it is not Zoom. So it is powered by Zoom, it looks a lot like Zoom, but it is not Zoom. So my first learning was the fact that, hey, I can't change the background on this thing very, very easily, or as seamlessly as I could in Zoom. When I actually got over the fact that it is not Zoom, but it is powered by Zoom, the application itself became a lot more usable. Where I recommend people focus on is that collaborative element and being able to sort of transfer files back and forth, collaborate on a project, collaborate on a seminar. Those are things that RingCentral is really known for and can be used for. So not Zoom, but RingCentral has some great features.